1, 5, 7 :)
Thanks for the ask! This is kinda a long one without any pretty pictures, so I’ve tagged it for anyone who doesn’t want it clogging up their dash.
1. Historical figure you used to like before you learned more about.
I’ve never actually liked him, but Winston Churchill. I knew he was 'problematic’ to an extent, but I was pretty neutral on him since, you know, he “saved Europe” from the Nazis. I also didn’t learn about him in school, so I just took the established opinion of him at face value. But MY GOD he was a racist, white supremacist, imperialist, genocidal piece of shit. Here are some choice quotes from the man himself:
On the Boer War (1902): “[It was] great fun galloping about.” “[My only] irritation [is] “that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men” (The ‘great fun’ being the war in which the British sent 100,000+ black Africans to concentration camps, and ‘Kaffir’ being a racist term for black Africans.)
On the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds (1920): “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes … it would spread a lively terror.”
On Mussolini (1927): “In the conflict between Fascism and Bolshevism, there was no doubt where my sympathies and convictions lay.” (Hint: it was fascism.)
On Palestinians (1930s): “Barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.” On self-determination: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger.”
On Jewish people (1937): “It may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution — that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer.” (Hitler was already in power, so YIKES)
On the genocide of Native Americans and Indigenous Australians (1937): “I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
On the partition of India (1947): “I’d rather see them have a good civil war.” “The Hindus were [a] race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is due” (’Pullulation’ meaning ‘to multiply rapidly’, and ‘the doom that is their due’ being the brutal, sectarian partition in which millions were killed and displaced. Churchill may have helped create Pakistan — or as he called it, Britain’s “bit of India” — but he despised Pakistanis, who he considered a “lower manifestation” of humanity.)
On the Bengal Famine which killed 3 million (1944): “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” (Keep in mind that, like the Irish Famine, the Bengal Famine was a direct result of his own government exporting rice from India, despite the fact that crops had failed and that Churchill was repeatedly warned that continuing to export rice would lead to famine. Not only did Churchill deny relief to Bengal, but he also blamed the Bengalis for their own starvation for “breeding like rabbits.”)
His opposition to Nazism wasn’t nearly as principled as most people believe. Far from being an anti-fascist and anti-Nazi, Churchill was himself a fascist eugenicist, who only opposed the Nazis insofar as Hitler’s imperial ambitions threatened British dominance. This was the same Churchill who once boasted that the “Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” and whose main criticism of Hitler was that he had “not been mellowed by the great success that ha[d] attended him,” lamenting the loss of “the Hitler of peace and tolerance.” I was neutral on Churchill before, but now I’m pretty comfortable placing him in the same league as other racist mass murderers, if not in death toll, then certainly in his views. The British Viceroy of India said that “Churchill’s attitude towards India and the famine is negligent, hostile and contemptuous.” The Indian Secretary of State said that there wasn’t “much difference between his outlook and Hitler's.” His own secretary attested to him saying that Indians were “a foul race ... and he wished Bert Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.” And those were just his view on Indians. While Churchill’s own colleagues saw him as an extremist, the cult of British exceptionalism demands that these inconvenient aspects of his legacy be ignored, lest they contradict the narrative of the Empire as an ultimately beneficial, civilising force.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think that Churchill is worthy of serious study, as all influential and complex figures are. But he is uncritically considered The Greatest Briton of All Time purely because of his whitewashed wartime legacy, which has been used time and time again to dismiss the very real harm he caused to millions of people and continues to cause harm today. Stalin also “saved Europe” from the Nazis, but it would be insulting to say his role in defeating Nazism somehow excuses his atrocities. Yet Churchill’s atrocities are constantly excused because his victims were mostly brown “savages” (his words), who needed to be ‘civilised’ anyway. You only have to look at this BBC article to see his apologists’ mental gymnastics in trying to defend him (here’s my favourite: “Although Churchill did think that white people were superior, that didn't mean he necessarily thought it was OK to treat non-white people in an inhumane way”). As a POC from a former American colony, I find the systematic erasure of the atrocities committed by the Anglosphere and the knee-jerk defensiveness towards any acknowledgement of the intergenerational trauma caused beyond irritating. The Cult of Churchill is but one example of this.
5. Historical figure we should talk more about.
JASPER TUDOR UNCLE OF THE CENTURY. Now that was a man who was actually loyal to his brothers and protected his nephews, unlike... some other uncles I could name lol. He’s also the one Tudor man (aside from Arthur) that PGregs couldn’t demonise, although she did still portray him as a 26 year old man being in hopelessly love with his 13 year old sister-in-law, which uh, NEVER HAPPENED.
Anyway, I have a whole tag devoted to Jasper here if you want to learn more about him. There are also three historical biographies dedicated to him: Jasper Tudor: Dynasty Maker by Terry Breverton (2014), Jasper Tudor: Godfather of the Tudor Dynasty by Debra Bayani (2015), and Jasper: The Tudor Kingmaker by Dr Sarah Elin Roberts (2015). I haven’t actually read them myself so I can’t give you my opinion on them, but I have read Wales and the Wars of the Roses by Howell T. Evans (1915) which discusses Jasper in detail and I highly recommend.
7. Favourite primary source.
Oh man, it’s so hard to choose! Purely in terms of aesthetics, it has to be Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. I even have a whole tag devoted to salivating over the pretty colours lol. In terms of textual information, I’d probably say Henry VII’s letter to his mama, Maggie B. It reveals so much about Henry’s relationship with his mother, including how close they were, how much he respected her, and how often they collaborated in matters of state. It also includes this cute line:
I shall be as glad to plese you as youre herte can desire hit, and I knowe welle that I am as much bounden so to doe as any creture lyvyng, for the grete and singular moderly love and affection that hit hath plesed you at all tymes to ber towards me.
I was supposed to write a post about it, but I got lazy so it’s still sitting in my drafts. In terms of both textual information and literature, I think Gwaith Lewys Glyn Cothi is pretty underrated as a primary source. They’re poems, so naturally there’s a lot of embellishment, but they give a lot of insight into the under-explored Welsh aspect of the Wars of the Roses from someone who actually lived through the era. I’m also Jasper Tudor trash, so of course I’d like anything that talks about him.
(The history asks meme is still open!)
